The hospitality industry is the most volatile industry in relation to lawsuits. This is why if you are working in this field, it is important that you have a good understanding of the law related to hospitality. From the moment you decide to go on vacation until you complete it and return home, a whole series of misfortunes can arise that spoil your well-deserved rest.
If you are working with an airline; or travel and tourism agency; or hotels and tourist transportation, it pays to know what you can do to avoid a potentially expensive lawsuit that could bankrupt you or your company.
The context of the law relating to hospitality can be classified into three types. The first is tort law, the second is contract law, and the third is agency law. In this article we will analyze the law of evil.
Tort law relates to such areas as the transfer of people, land, and personal property. The other area in tort law relates to the law of negligence.
If you were a hotel manager and discovered that an unregistered person was using the pool, what would you do? The simple answer is that you can evict the person from the premise as he or she is an intruder. But what if, as an intruder and while using the pool, he was injured because the pool area was wet and slippery and not properly maintained?
Obviously, if the injured person were a guest, you could certainly bring an action against your hotel for negligence. This is because, as a hotel manager, he has a duty to his guest and by failing to uphold his premise, this duty of care was breached. The fact that the guest has suffered an injury will be enough to initiate a civil liability action. This is pretty safe. But what is uncertain is whether the same level of protection under the law can be applied to a person who is a trespasser on hotel premises. This is something that requires a deeper analysis.
If this matter goes to court, the likely test the court will apply is based on a concept called causation. This is looking at the situation objectively and deciding based on what lawyers would like to boast about called the ‘reasonable man’ argument. (We will talk about this in another article). Based on this concept, what it means is that if the injured person was a guest or an intruder, the key question would be if the injury caused, was it due to direct negligence on the part of the hotel in not maintaining its facilities?
If the answer is that the injury was caused by the hotel’s negligence in failing to maintain the premise, then this would be grounds for both the guest and the intruder to file a lawsuit.
But of course it is not as simple as that. There are other considerations for the analysis. How and why was the intruder able to access the pool? And the concept of the innocent intruder!
This is just one example of the importance of the law in the hotel industry. There are other factors to consider as well. We will talk about this in another article.